| Aran Ward Sell | Blog & Writing |

Notice

So.

Today I handed in my notice at Leith Library. I’ve been offered a new part-time job as a ‘Web Content Editor’ at Edinburgh Uni, which will fit in better with my uni schedule. I’m (hopefully) going to be doing both jobs for a bit, then dropping to just the new one early next month.

As some of you will know, I’ve also been doing some pretty involved academic applications for next year. These…aren’t going as well. I’ve been offered PhD positions at both Edinburgh and Cambridge (which is nice), but it looks like I won’t be able to take either of them up because I haven’t got funding. I’m on the “reserve list” for Research Council funding at Edinburgh, but that only comes into play if other people don’t accept their funding offers, so it’s fair to say it’s a long shot. I’m alternating between disappointment (and just a wee bit of anger at an academic ‘career’ system that so blatantly privileges the already-wealthy; in what other field do you have to apply for wages separately from the job? MPs’ salaries, for example, were introduced over a hundred years ago to prevent a near-identical bias) at this, and a more sanguine pleasure that two of the world’s best English Literature departments want me to do a doctorate with them, even if I can’t actually do so. The hunt for funding carries on though, and who knows what I might unearth.

Still, it’s exciting to be moving and shaking a little, not just sitting watching rejections drift like ash into my inbox. I’m leaving the library job mostly because, though I like lots of things about it, it’s on a mildly absurd scattergun shift pattern where I have to go to Leith almost daily for not many actual paid hours. The new job should give me a similar amount of hours but pack them into a couple of days, and it’s also much closer to home – giving me a lot more time from June onwards to focus on my Master’s thesis.